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Drupal Developers Still Rebelling Against Drupal Leadership
New submitter cornholed writes: In an update to previous posts on Slashdot, prominent Drupal and PHP Developer Larry Garfield is still defending his reputation against allegations by Drupal leadership against sexual misconduct. As previously reported by a variety of news organizations, Larry was exiled from the Drupal project for adherence to the Gor sci-fi lifestyle.
In the latest round of allegations, Garfield was reportedly asked to resign because an autistic "woman who attended Drupal community events ... was allowed to contribute by him". While some have accused Dries Buytart and the Drupal Association of "Autism Shaming", the leader of the Drupal project claims "this person could be vulnerable and may have been subject to exploitation", hence raising the risk of legal damage to the Drupal project. Larry refutes these allegations, saying these claims are post-hoc and has shared police reports purporting his innocence.
There is still much debate in the Drupal community around why Larry was ejected from his leadership positions. While there's much speculation over Larry's ouster, there is one thing for certain: become a leader in the OSS community and a dossier on your public statements just might be made about you.
In the latest round of allegations, Garfield was reportedly asked to resign because an autistic "woman who attended Drupal community events ... was allowed to contribute by him". While some have accused Dries Buytart and the Drupal Association of "Autism Shaming", the leader of the Drupal project claims "this person could be vulnerable and may have been subject to exploitation", hence raising the risk of legal damage to the Drupal project. Larry refutes these allegations, saying these claims are post-hoc and has shared police reports purporting his innocence.
There is still much debate in the Drupal community around why Larry was ejected from his leadership positions. While there's much speculation over Larry's ouster, there is one thing for certain: become a leader in the OSS community and a dossier on your public statements just might be made about you.
weirdos are turning on each other?
Shocked! Shocked! I say!
So, there's some incorporated foundation or what-not (Ah, "Drupal Association") behind the ongoing poisoning of the Interwebs with 20 year old technology (OK, looked it up 16 year old technology) built on top of 30 year old technology, both of which deserved to die an awful death (we are talking about SOFTWARE here) years ago?
And, because there are so many sheeples just making the same mistakes over and over to keep this junk alive, that they have nothing better to do than to pick-apart the lives of people involved in some bizarre and complicated (and sounds time-consuming) sexual cult rather than focusing on their own bizarre software cult of meh-ness?
So, here is my history with PHP. Some time mid-90s (I thought it was 95 or 96, but I just checked facts and I guess PHP never existed before 97) I worked on a project to make one of the first online shopping carts. (The end-customer was Tesco, FWIW). I wrote the shopping cart code in C, for NSAPI.
But we needed more than just a shopping cart. And I'd heard about this PHP thing, I emailed the author, and he sent me the script. (That's the way it worked at the time.) I think it was helpful in fleshing out the rest of the site. I guess some kind of food catalog. (The company was in the catalog-making business. They were making catalogs on CDROMs (remember those?) and print, and the big deal was they could push a button and publish to BOTH woohoo!. I'd suggested it wouldn't be much of a stretch to also publish to HTML and so I was allowed to noodle with the idea, and somehow it was convenient at the time to incorporate PHP.
It actually wasn't awful at the time. It was just a little script that some guy made to help him make his personal website. And it worked well enough for our purposes, at the time. I guess.
That was the last time I ever used PHP. I didn't ride the thing into it's awfulness and "redemption". It was a cute hack, especially for somebody with no formal computer science training.
But it's led to - even today! - "developers" getting their peanut butter mixed with... er, I mean writing code in HTML pages. And not understanding why the browser is not executing their PHP code or isn't able to stuff PHP variables from Javascript without employing powdered cleanser. Or why websites can't violate the laws of physics and reach into the past and change variable values is code that already ran and went.
Really, there are far more perverted things going on here than some amusing sexual proclivities that I really do not want to know about.
Do these people find any time to code?
More importantly, how sick are these people who still feel the need to abuse one individual, when they are already abusing millions or billions?
P.S. I really want to cash in my 0.001 shares of Adobe that I got out of this. I can't find the damn Macromedia stock certificate.
https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-part-5
Briefly: this fiasco went on for weeks without anyone mentioning any concern about the female autistic housemate, so Larry Garfield doesn't believe this current statement. He believes that the actual reason at the core of this is intolerance for his "alternative" lifestyle. And he is severing all ties with Drupal:
It's difficult for me, as a total outsider, to decide whom to believe in this he said/they said situation. But I'm inclined to believe Garfield because of this part of his blog posting:
Given that the police and social workers had already focused their attention on Larry Garfield's personal life and his situation with the autistic female housemate, and nobody threw any red flags that the situation was abusive, it's difficult to believe that the Drupal project's lawyers ordered the Drupal leadership to eject Garfield over suspicions of abuse. It's easier to believe that this is cover for a decision already made for other reasons.
P.S. Garfield racked up some points with me for this blog post: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-dont-go-low
(bolding and italics in the original)
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
On the other hand, if you don't want to be judged for keeping sex slaves, maybe don't bring them with you to a convention where you're one of the leaders, and if you do, maybe don't parade them around. I could quite easily see where some people having seen him parade his sex slave, and having seen that she has a considerable and obvious mental handicap might jump to the conclusion that he was exploiting her. Sure, he has a police note that says he's not raping her, but obviously this type of misunderstanding has happened before, or he wouldn't have that note.
I'd bet money that the real reason he was eventually dismissed, has nothing to do with his kink. After he refused to resign, he went public and became a shit disturber. At that point, it should have been clear that he was never getting his position back. Kink is one thing, taking your personal crap and using it to divide the community is another. He's toxic now, because of his actions in the project. So the only way back for him is the complete removal of all the other project leaders, which would likely kill Drupal.
He thinks they're upset with him because he likes to treat women like sex slaves, and it's true that they were likely horrified when they were told that he showed off his sex slave at a Drupal conference. However, once he made it clear it was consensual relationship and that he had no reason to resign, he might have kept his position if he had kept his mouth shut, and let the whole thing blow over. Instead, he had to get righteously indignant and blog about the whole mess. At that point, instead of making the problem go away, he made it much, much worse for himself. When the problem was the kink, it was something that could be dealt with, mostly by being a bit more private about it. But the blog posts made him the problem, and then the only solution was to remove him from the leadership.
So, in my opinion, nobody's in the right here, it's just a mess created by fallible people.
Fanatically anti-fanatical